Page 33 - IT Essentials And Data Recovery For Online Businesses

the port on the device. In the room where the networked computer is located, you’ll

run a second Ethernet cable from the device to the networking jack in the
computer.

Sharing Printers and Programs

Now that all your business computers have access to the Internet, you’ll want to

give them all access to the “server” – in other words, the business’ main computer,
which is probably yours.

In the context of a small or home-based business network, the “server” is the

computer that contains the programs and is attached to the peripherals that are to
be shared. As such, it should be the most powerful computer on the network. You

may wish to add a second or external hard drive with partitions for each employee

for file storage and backup.

Windows XP makes this process exceptionally easy through the use of a wizard. In

case you haven’t encountered this term before, a “wizard” is simply a feature of

many software applications that use a series of dialogue boxes that pose “yes/no”
questions, which you answer by clicking on the appropriate button or filling in
information. Based on your answers, the wizard creates the document or completes

the task for you.

The first step is to call up the Windows control panel as shown in Figure 17a. This
time however, you’ll click on the icon labeled “Network Setup Wizard” (it looks like

a while house with a red roof with a pipe sticking out the bottom connecting to

what looks like a water main). This brings up the Network Setup Wizard as shown
in Figure 16a on the following page.

As you go through the wizard, the only other vital piece of information you’ll need

(assuming you have everything hooked up and ready to go) is for the dialogue in
which you are asked about a connection method (Figure 16b). Since all the